When Mr Farooq Leghari was appointed foreign minister instead of finance minister by prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 1993, her motives were thought to be transparent enough. Mr Leghari was said to know more about economics and finance than all Ms Bhutto’s MNAs put together. As the PPP’s premier Mr Clean, Mr Leghari had done an admirable job as minister for water and power in Ms Bhutto’s first government (1988-90) and he would have made an excellent finance minister during her second term. But the last thing Ms Bhutto wanted now was a competent, honest, no-nonsense finance minister who would not only have known what to do but, more importantly, what not to do. No. The prime minister was determined to retain the finance ministry in her own grasp so that she could handpick appointments to the financial institutions of the country and dispense patronage at will. So Mr Leghari was banished to the foreign ministry where, if he’d lasted, he would have been fated to play second-fiddle to the glamourous, glib, globe-trotting daughter of the East.
Mr Leghari owes his elevation to the Presidency soon thereafter to a peculiar combination of circumstances. Originally, the idea was to accommodate Mr Wasim Sajjad as a “consensus” candidate, provided Mr Nawaz Sharif agreed to help repeal the 8th amendment. When Mr Sharif refused, Ms Bhutto toyed with Mr Hamid Nasir Chattha but quickly abandoned the idea when eyebrows were raised in certain powerful quarters. As the search for a PPP president got underway, Mr Leghari increasingly began to appear as the right man for the job. He had stuck by the Peoples Party, in particular the Leaderene, through thick and thin for seventeen long years, so his credentials were irreproachable. Having denied him the coveted finance ministry, Ms Bhutto saw this as a good opportunity to placate him by kicking him upstairs where his do-good inclinations wouldn’t interfere in the cynical running of the executive. There could not be a better man in the Presidency than the deferential Sardar of the vanishing Leghari tribe, thought Ms Bhutto. At last, she would have her very own Fazal Elahi Chaudhry!
Mr Leghari’s first few months in the Presidency were unfortunately marred by controversy and bad blood. Mr Nawaz Sharif and the opposition boycotted Mr Leghari’s oath-taking ceremony. When President Leghari expressed a desire to call on Mr Sharif in Lahore, the opposition leader bluntly rebuffed the gesture by proclaiming that he would have nothing to do with “a jiyala President”. Since a “jiyala President” was exactly what Ms Bhutto was seeking to consolidate, she must have been delighted by the opposition’s reproachful attitude towards Mr Leghari. “That should clip Leghari’s wings and dampen any ambitions he may harbour of playing an intrusive role in times to come”, was the way many PPP stalwarts put it.
Soon thereafter, the opposition had occasion to “confirm” its suspicions. When Ms Bhutto moved against the Sabir Shah government in the NWFP, the President was constitutionally obliged to act on her advice. Having refused to open a line of communication with him in the first place, the opposition was now quick to condemn Mr Leghari’s intervention in support of Mr Aftab Sherpao. For the opposition, it was irrelevant that Mr Aftab Sherpao’s move came after Mr Sabir Shah had already lost support of the independent MPs who had propped up the PML(N) coalition. It was irrelevant that Mr Sherpao had every constitutional right, however distasteful his modus operandi, to move a vote of no-confidence against Mr Shah. It was irrelevant that under the constitution Mr Leghari, whatever his personal disquiet, had no option but to accept the federal government’s advice and act accordingly. The opposition desperately wanted to believe that President Leghari was a “jiyala” and the circumstances were tailored to reinforce such convictions. If the opposition was hopping mad at the President, Ms Bhutto must have been delighted. The greater the hostility between the President and the opposition, the better for the prime minister! A wedge was later to be driven between the President and the opposition during President Leghari’s trip to the USA in April 94.
Mr Leghari had made no plans to attend his son’s graduation ceremony in the United States. But he was persuaded by the prime minister and the army chief to undertake the trip for an important reason. Following US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott’s visit to Pakistan in January, the Americans were keen for Ms Bhutto to visit Washington immediately so that they could lean on her to make concessions on Pakistan’s nuclear programme in exchange for a waiver to the Pressler amendment. Since the troika was united in opposing any concessions to Washington, it was felt that Ms Bhutto’s trip, far from resolving the core issue, might yield a negative fallout at home and abroad. Far better, it was thought, that President Leghari should undertake an exercise in “quiet diplomacy” on the pretext of a personal visit. In this manner, Pakistan’s national security concerns could be forcefully reiterated before the Americans without any hint of a snub by the government of Pakistan or any suggestion of false expectations at home.
The opposition, unfortunately, saw this as an opportunity to attack the President. A campaign was mounted to allege that the President had incurred huge expenses from the state treasury in undertaking a “personal” trip to the United States. Mr Leghari’s overloaded working itinerary was ignored or belittled. The interesting point is that at no stage did the government’s media managers make any serious effort to brief the press about the real purpose behind the President’s visit to the United States. Nor did the government seriously dispute the opposition’s allegations against the President of “overspending” or “misusing official facilities”. It seemed as though the government was happy to sit back and derive malicious pleasure from the erosion of Mr Leghari’s credibility in the eyes of the people.
The “Mehrangate” affair, which erupted while Mr Leghari was still in the United States, was a blow to the President’s reputation. Even as the opposition was fabricating “facts” about his sale of land to Mr Yunus Habib (at worst, an error of judgement), government spokesmen like interior minister General Naseerullah Babar and law minister Iqbal Haider were blithely issuing contradictory and wishy washy statements which only served to deepen suspicions about Mr Leghari’s role in the matter. The curious aspect of the whole affair is that when Mr Leghari personally sought to clarify his position to a section of the press, the government’s media managers only made only half-hearted efforts to disseminate his detailed interviews. As a matter of fact, some PPP stalwarts privately expressed displeasure over attempts by the President to defend himself in public and at least one such view was reflected in the editorial of an Islamabad newspaper known to be close to the government. Although conclusive proof of the government’s complicity in the sordid character-assassination of President Leghari is not available, it is now known that the person who leaked the “Mehrangate” land deal story to Mr Sharif was none other than the aggressive PML(N) MNA who was arrested some months ago for fraudulent land transactions and then defected to the PPP by announcing the formation of a PML(N) “forward bloc”, courtesy a well-known media manager of the PPP government.
The arrest of Mian Mohammad Sharif by General Babar’s hounds on the eve of President Leghari’s address to a joint sitting of Parliament drove the opposition and the President further apart. Mr Nawaz Sharif had originally rejected the proposal (made by the same double-faced PML(N) MNA referred to above) that opposition MNAs should shower Mr Leghari with rotten eggs and tomatoes during his Presidential address. Instead, the opposition had contrived a harmless plan to sneak a few small tape-recorders into parliament and play back the “Go Baba Go” tapes of 1992 to remind Mr Leghari of his raucous role at the time. Mian Sharif’s arrest, however, put paid to that. An outraged opposition went to parliament and lunged for the President. In the brawls which ensued, government thugs beat up a couple of opposition members so badly that they had to be hospitalised. Relations between the President and the opposition hit an all-time low, prompting many people to wonder whether the timing of Mian Sharif’s arrest (he was as inexplicably released some days later) was in some way linked to efforts by certain government circles to drive yet another wedge between the President and the opposition.
It has taken Nawaz Sharif nearly eighteen months to realise that his strategy of attacking President Leghari has played directly into Benazir Bhutto’s hands. By trying to weaken Mr Leghari and erode his credentials, Mr Sharif has effectively debarred himself from trying to exploit a potentially powerful source of influence, moderation and balance in the political system (a lesson the wily Ms Bhutto was quick to demonstrate when she successfully drove a wedge between Mr Sharif and Mr Ghulam Ishaq Khan in 1993). If all this is clear, why does Mr Sharif still demand assurances that Mr Leghari is not a “jiyala” and will indeed play the bipartisan role expected of him? When President Leghari reflects on how the Bhutto government has let him down on so many counts, is it not conceivable that he may be deeply hurt, offended and even angry? Equally, can any conscientious and informed person remain oblivious to the continuing follies, inefficiencies and corruptions of the Bhutto government without wringing his hands in despair and reflecting about alternatives and options?
For Mr Sharif’s benefit, it may be necessary to inject some cold facts about Mr Farooq Leghari into the calculations. Mr Leghari’s contribution to the struggle for the restoration of democracy is second to none in the Peoples Party, so he doesn’t owe anything to anyone. He has been to prison, he has been showered with lathis and blows. He was the party’s leading light during Ms Bhutto’s incarceration abroad until 1986. He was the Bhutto government’s most competent and clean face during its years in office from 1988 to 1990. More crucially, it was Mr Leghari who played a decisive role in determining the choice of PPP candidates from south Punjab in the 1993 elections, an intervention which helped Ms Bhutto form a government in Islamabad. If Ms Bhutto has elevated him to the Presidency, Mr Leghari must surely know that she did him no great favour — he, and he alone in the PPP, merited the honour and responsibility.
Mr Leghari is also, as everyone knows, a genuinely pious, patriotic and self-respecting man. When he resigned from the Peoples Party after becoming President, he was sending an obvious message: he would sincerely strive to become the President of Pakistan by rising above party political interests. When he expressed a desire to call upon Mr Sharif shortly after, he was trying to build bridges between the government and the opposition in order to strengthen democracy.
Mr Farooq Leghari has said time and again that he does not want to be an “intrusive” President. That should reassure the prime minister, although God knows her bumbling government would benefit enormously from some definite intrusions by the President. Mr Leghari is also ready to break the ice with Mr Sharif. That should be welcomed by the leader of the opposition who needs to think in national rather than party terms all the time.
Finally, if Mr Sharif wants to know whether President Farooq Leghari is still a “jiyala” or not, there can be no better way of finding out than by having a heart to heart talk with him. Mr Sharif has nothing to lose and much to gain from opening a dialogue with the President and keeping it going despite any initial frustrations which might result. In a calm and composed manner, Mr Farooq Leghari has come a long way in the last eighteen months. He has a longer way to go in the next four years. It is in the interests of Pakistan and democracy that everyone should seek to extract maximum mileage from this clean and capable man of immense integrity.